Inventor of the electronic mail, American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson has died aged 74

Inventor of the electronic mail, American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson has died aged 74. Ray Tomlinson has died of heart attack on Saturday English The Daily Telegraph reported.

The American computer engineer sent his first electronic mail using widely-used @ symbol in1971 while working as an engineer at Massachusetts. He sent a message between two computers in the same office on the ARPANET system, a precursor to the internet.

The address system he used consisted of @ symbol which is used to separate a user name from it's host domain for an address. This system of electronic message and @ symbol later used to create a modern email

Today, more than 200 billion emails are sent a day from more than 4 billion accounts. @ symbol is also used in Twitter and Instagram and is common shorthand for “at”.

He sent first electronic mail in 1971 however “said he could not remember what was sent as most of the test messages he used were nonsense. When I was satisfied that the program seemed to work, I sent a message to the rest of my group explaining how to send messages over the network. The first use of network email announced its own existence” he had explained Daily Telegraph reported.

Jerry Burchfiel, a former colleague, recalled that when he was shown the invention, he told Tomlinson: “Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on.” newspaper reported.